The Artist in the Garden

— Nan Sterman

People often ask where the ideas for episodes of A Growing Passion come from. Some come from places I’ve written about or projects I know from the decades I’ve been a journalist. Some are topics that fascinate me or pique my curiosity. Some come from producer Marianne Gerdes, and some from people who email us with suggestions and ideas.

Many topics are inspired by long time friends and colleagues, as is the case for the episode, The Art of a Garden.

The Art of a Garden showcases five professional artists, each of whom is also a gardener. Their gardens are a fascinating study of the ways art and garden intersect. And how, for these creative individuals, the garden is merely another pallet with which they can do their magic.

My friend and travel buddy Betsy Schulz makes fantastic ceramic murals you may have seen on the walls of libraries around San Diego County or at Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach. When it comes to creativity, Betsy knows no limits. She combines ceramics with glass, history with nature, and fuses (literally) it all into a cohesive whole. Her garden too is a fusion of different components. The plants work with pieces of rusted metal, old fire extinguishers, strings of light, hubcaps, murals, dishes, and all kinds of things that in my garden would look like junk, but in Betsy’s are pure art.

My long time friends Erik and Irina Gronborg have one of the most color-filled gardens I’ve ever seen. Theirs is a decades long collaboration inspired by their travels and executed on a shoestring. The process of learning to garden inspired their interest in odd and unusual plants, from cactus to bromeliads. Erik is a renowned sculptor and ceramic artist so when he sees a need for the garden, he makes it, and makes it beautiful, be it the latch on their chicken coop gate or the hose guards that protect their plants from decapitation from when heavy hoses get dragged through the garden.

Irina is a botanical illustrator who specializes in colored pencil. When they aren’t creating new garden spaces, Irina takes charge of the couple’s collection of fruit trees and vegetable beds.

When I step into Erik and Irina’s garden, my heart skips a beat just looking at the many details of their joint creation.

Ceramicist Laird Plumleigh came onto my radar screen when I moved to San Diego County in the mid 1980s. I’ve long been enamored of California pottery and California style ceramics. In fact, my husband and I were married at the Adamson House at Malibu Lagoon State Beach Park, an historic 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival home, fully decorated with tiles from Malibu Potteries. Around that same time, Pasadena ceramicist Ernest Batchelder was developing his distinctive style of tiles for California bungalow homes – it was, after all, the height of the Craftsman era. Plumleigh is one of the few artists who make a line of tiles done in Batchelder’s style. We bought tiles from Laird for our first home and have sent people to him ever since, including my landscape design clients. In the segment about Laird, you’ll see his Batchelder inspired tiles, along with his plant and nature-inspired ceramics “growing” throughout his garden.

I didn’t know glass artist Cherrie LaPorte before we shot her garden and studio but she’s now become part of our world. Her garden in San Diego County’s Lake Hodges area is a wonderland of glass and tile. Mobiles of shiny red and pink and yellow glass hang from oak tree branches. Collections of intricate objects are tucked in amongst her growing collection of succulents, too.

Cherrie has a vast imagination and she views everyday objects as surfaces to cover with colored glass and beads and shiny baubles. Everything is fair game – from surfboards to guitars to beehives. How fun to see her art in her studio, and then to see those same objects a few weeks later in an exhibition at the California Center for the Arts.

I am so fortunate to be surrounded by these creative souls. Their enthusiasm and endless imaginations are a constant inspiration. I hope they inspire you too.